Bad policy cuts the ground from under Aboriginal feet

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A softly-softly approach to corruption in land councils is just part of the problem, writes Gaynor Macdonald.

After two decades observing land councils struggle with high expectations, few resources and scant accountability, it is hardly surprising that little seems to have been achieved and that reports of "corruption" still abound, as evident in the land deals exposed by the Herald this week.

When the NSW Aboriginal Land Rights Act was passed in 1983, local land councils were excited about receiving funds over which they would have discretionary power for the first time. Few people, Aboriginal or otherwise, did the arithmetic to show that the "vast" amounts being allocated would average $120 to $500 an Aboriginal person a year.

Yet it was promised that land rights would "meet basic needs" - housing, improved health standards, better education and employment opportunities. It clearly could not do so - but who went out to local land councils to explain that it couldn't? And what could be achieved, and how?

Twenty years later these questions are as pertinent as they were in 1983.

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I have seen examples of "best practice", what Aboriginal people can achieve under responsible, experienced and committed leadership.

There have been some terrific people in the land council system in NSW - at all levels. But they have battled with a structure that works against responsibility and accountability, leaving them no real power to "manage".

I have also seen successes swept away through ill-conceived change. The fact that there are local and regional land councils that have done well is a real credit to people who have not only had to deal with inadequacies in the act but also its major restructuring when it has proven to be a useful political football. As Wiradjuri people often say: "As soon as we get the ball, they shift the goalposts."

What the Herald coverage does not reveal is why so many local land councils are getting into the red in the first place, and why many end up under administration. Non-payment of rates is a major issue but why are they not paid? Two common answers come to mind.

First, land councils own land that may be insufficiently productive: it has been claimed or bought for reasons that do not accord with a market economy based on land values. The Aboriginal value lies in a history of dispossession and injustice.

Perhaps the Government should introduce a more flexible system of graduated rate payment, payable only when land becomes productive, a recognition that land is been acquired as a form of compensation.

Second, a great deal of land has been acquired for housing - an ongoing need - and many tenants have not paid rent. Some refuse because they "are living on Aboriginal land and shouldn't have to". The housing company that administers the houses cannot meet its commitments and is dissolved, the responsibility flowing back to the land council as land owner. The land council in turn is handed over to an administrator, who may or may not get more people to pay rent.

It has proved immensely costly in terms of relationships, time and energy to get such tenants evicted. I know personally of some who have trashed or torched houses when they are eventually, after years of effort by land council officers, moved out.

In the 20-plus years I have worked with Wiradjuri people in central NSW, I have seen as much cultural destruction under the policy of self-management as they experienced in the whole century before it.

Actual Aboriginal cultural practice has become harder and harder to sustain. The policy of self-management has been destructive of community-based authority structures, beliefs, kin-based relationships, internal political and economic values.

This in turn has promoted social problems on an unprecedented scale, including substance abuse, violence and corruption.

All too often in analyses of these issues, the impact of the massive decline in economic opportunities in rural areas is overlooked.

Self-management has not meant Aboriginal people could get together, empowered by structures through which valued and needed resources could flow, working out their own agendas, priorities and programs.

Rather, governments have created "relations of management" between Aboriginal people ("land councils") to encourage outcomes governments see as desirable. Under the rubric that self-management is an enlightened approach that frees Aboriginal people from bureaucratic control, they are required to become the bureaucrats, expected not only to manage their communities but also to monitor and police them.

The "softly-softly" approach taken in the past by law enforcement agencies towards malpractice in land councils, often to the despair of those trying to do the right thing, has been unhelpful. If people who had deliberately misappropriated funds in the early days had been charged and dealt with according to the law, others who followed later might have been discouraged from taking the system for a ride.

Clearly there are no simple "solutions". But there is a proven Aboriginal capacity, a willingness to learn, adapt and engage, even when this means confronting the enormous challenges that such change demands.

But they do need partners - government and private - with an equal will to see them succeed.

The Herald's story of blatant exploitation by private industry, and by some Aboriginal people, needs to be linked to years of government inactivity even when it has commissioned reports on which it might act.

In 1998 the inquiry by the Independent Commission Against Corruption into NSW Aboriginal land councils made useful recommendations relating to corruption prevention, few of which were implemented.

What Aboriginal land councils badly need is goodwill, respect, appropriate structures which encourage accountability, the right to the law when required, and the personnel and financial resources that can turn them around again.

That goodwill and support must start with the State Government.

Dr Gaynor Macdonald is a senior lecturer in anthropology at the University of Sydney and author of Two Steps Forward, Three Steps Back: A Wiradjuri Land Rights Journey (2004, Let Her Rip Press, Canada Bay).